This past October, Amazon unveiled the Amazon Halo Rise, a touchless sleep tracker that uses machine learning to produce helpful insights for improving the quality of your sleep.
Amazon Halo Rise
$139.99
About sleep health
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) and Sleep Research Society (SRS) recommends that adults ages 18-60 get 7 or more hours of sleep per night on a regular basis for optimal health. The consensus among medical experts is that chronic sleep deprivation can put you at higher risk of adverse health conditions such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and stroke, and depression. Insufficient sleep, in general, can also impair immune function and overall cognition.
“Like diet and exercise, sleep is a cornerstone of people’s wellness and overall health, and too many people struggle with it,” said Dr. Vin Gupta, chief medical officer at Amazon Devices & Services, the business unit that developed the Amazon Halo Rise.
With sleep being an essential contributor to our overall health and well-being, there’s significant demand for devices and services to help people improve the quality of their sleep. With that said, it comes as no surprise that tech giants like Amazon have taken on the challenge of building those devices and services to help their customers live healthier lives.
Amazon Halo Rise and Machine Learning
Dr. Gupta is part of a large Amazon team that includes Stanford-trained sleep medicine physician Dr. Brandon Peters, among other medical experts. With years of experience and more than 1000 published medical articles on the subject of sleep, Dr. Peters’ past research and expertise on the subject were essential in the development of the machine-learning algorithm that powers the Halo Rise.
Related: Beyond Smart Home Technology: Enhancing the Helpful Home With Machine Learning
Machine learning is at the core of Halo Rise’s ability to produce meaningful insights from the data it collects while you sleep. Breathing and movement patterns are all captured via low-energy sensors and then feed to a machine-learning algorithm which is trained to validate and compare your sleep metrics against clinical standards for sleep analysis.
That customer centricity with Halo Rise has really been about doubling down on the fact that customers want to purchase wellness devices that they can trust. The information you’re getting from it is rigorous. It’s meaningful. It really can help you improve your sleep.
Dr. Vin Gupta, chief medical officer at Amazon Devices & Services
“We want Halo Rise to both empower the customer to improve their sleep performance, while also being a real ambient product that intelligently works in the background,” said Cody Gordh, product lead of the team that built the device. “If we can make our customers’ lives easier and help them improve their sleep, all without requiring a lot of thinking or hands-on interaction, then we believe the potential of Halo Rise is boundless,” he said. “There’s something so magical about the ‘set it and forget it’ experience with Halo Rise, where all you need to do is go to bed and wake up. It all works automatically.”
Halo Rise and Privacy
Through machine learning, Halo Rise also provides a layer of privacy with “primary-user tracking”, a privacy feature that ensures the only sleep data that is collected is that of the primary user of the device. This protects anyone other than the primary user from being monitored. Since Halo Rise is a touchless device and doesn’t contain a camera or microphone, its ability to learn and precisely identify the primary user based on other metrics is a testament to machine learning and ambient intelligence technology.
More than just a sleep tracker
The Halo Rise also includes a built-in smart alarm and wake-up light to facilitate a healthy waking routine. The light color temperatures and illumination strength the Halo Rise emits are designed to simulate the colors and illumination of a bright sunrise. While the alarm works in tandem with the device’s machine-learning algorithm, which determines the ideal time to wake you within a predefined window.
And of course, Halo Rise works with Amazon Alexa. It can connect to a compatible Echo device to sync your Halo Rise smart alarm to wake up to your favorite song and can be combined with other Alexa-enabled devices in your home as part of an Alexa Routine.
The Amazon Halo Rise goes on sale later this year and will include a 6-month Halo membership.
